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The year 1738 in science and technology involved some significant events.
AstronomyEdit
- Pierre Louis Maupertuis publishes Sur la figure de la terre, which confirms Newton's view that the Earth is an oblate spheroid slightly flattened at the poles.
BotanyEdit
- Publication of Hortus Cliffortianus, a detailed description by Linnaeus of George Clifford's gardens at Hartekamp, Netherlands, including the raising of exotic plants such as bananas in a greenhouse.
- Publication of Rariorum Africanarum plantarum, a flora of Cape Colony by Johannes Burman, begins publication in Amsterdam.
MathematicsEdit
- Abraham de Moivre publishes the second English edition of his The Doctrine of Chances containing a study of the coefficients in the binomial expansion of Template:Nowrap.
MedicineEdit
- February – Great Plague of 1738, an outbreak of bubonic plague, begins to spread from Banat across central Europe.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation
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- Establishment of The Mineral Water Hospital in Bath, England.
MetallurgyEdit
- July 1 – William Champion of Bristol patents a process to distill zinc from calamine using charcoal in a smelter.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
TechnologyEdit
- June 24 – Lewis Paul and John Wyatt obtain an English patent for roller cotton-spinning machinery, leading to the establishment of mechanised Paul-Wyatt cotton mills.<ref>Template:Cite ODNB</ref>
- Jacques de Vaucanson presents the world's first automaton, The Flute Player (1737) to the French Academy of Sciences.
- Black Forest clockmaker Franz Ketterer produces one of the earliest cuckoo clocks.
AwardsEdit
- Copley Medal: James Valoue<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation
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BirthsEdit
- November 15 – William Herschel, German-born astronomer (died 1822)
DeathsEdit
- June 21 – Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, English agriculturalist (born 1674)
- September 23 – Herman Boerhaave, Dutch physician (born 1668)